…to Samuelson (1969): [A high salary in the future] does?justify leveraged investment financed by borrowing against future earnings. But it does not really involve any increase in relative risk-taking once…
My University of Chicago colleague Raghu Rajan has started a blog. Raghu is a serious economist: very thoughtful and highly respected.? He is the former chief economist at the International…
For those of you still recovering from Gary Becker‘s take on immigration, you might want to skip his assessment of the financial-reform bill that looks set for passage. But if…
My colleague Richard Thaler writes about his recent experience at economics conferences: Over the last month, one question seemed to be on everyone’s mind at the economic conferences I attended…
Anxious investors can take heart: Congress’s August recess begins at the end of this week, which has historically been a good thing for the markets. Michael Ferguson and Hugh Douglas…
I expect to have a conversation with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, in the next couple of days. He’s a very smart and…
Wolfram Alpha has just launched a free?Widget Builder that lets you easily create widgets to calculate all kinds of things – seamlessly integrating data from the Alpha server.? (I’ve blogged…
Planet Money interviews Nassim Taleb, who recently participated in a Freakonomics quorum on financial reform, for its Deep Read series. Taleb compares the developed world’s dependence on debt to drug…
A Chicago company called Remote Sensing Metrics LLC has been using satellite images to track the number of cars in Wal-Mart parking lots, as a means of helping forecast earnings…
In a nifty piece of forensic analysis, two researchers claim to have figured out how to tell when executives are lying. David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina analyzed 30,000 conference calls…
Weary investors, take heart. Jeffrey A. Hirsch, editor of the Stock Trader’s Almanac is predicting good times ahead. Bloomberg reports that Hirsch is predicting “[t]he Dow Jones Industrial Average will…
In the wake of any financial crisis, a few people are always trotted forth (sometimes they do the trotting themselves) as having seen the particulars of the crisis in advance…
Photo: Andrew Magill Thanks to Time.com for naming this blog one of the top “financial” blogs — and the nice writeup from the Wall Street Journal‘s Robert Frank — but…
(Digital Vision) I’ve written on the woeful state of Americans’ financial literacy a few times in the past. There is probably no academic researcher more attuned to the problem than…
It’s been a busy week for JPMorgan Chase. It’s only Wednesday, and already the bank has settled one civil fraud lawsuit and been slapped with another one. Both shed light…
(liquidlibrary) So by now you’re hopefully aware that the stock market completely bombed today. As I type, the Dow is down more than 500 points, its worst day since December…
…a paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Development Economics, Jonathan Zinman and I apply this approach to the question of how the poor spend their microfinance loans. Now, to be…
Photo: laverrue A few years ago, a friend of mine who used to work on Wall Street told me that the only stock anyone needed to own was Goldman Sachs….
What is this photo about? It came to me courtesy of Jan Chipchase, a design guru who spoke at a great meeting last week on how to help microfinance…
…to harm the organization (Gallagher, 2006; Oppler et al., 2008). Bernerth elaborates in a press release: With regards to personality and credit – it makes sense that conscientiousness is related…
[omny:https://traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/aaea4e69-af51-495e-afc9-a9760146922b/14a43378-edb2-49be-8511-ab0d000a7030/43b4d44f-6625-43a2-8edb-ab0d001c2710/audio.mp3] Mitt Romney won big in New Hampshire, but his opponents are vowing to push on in South Carolina. Which means stepping up their pleas for cash. In an e-mail…
In our latest podcast, “What Do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have in Common?” we talked about America’s financial literacy problem, a topic we’ve written about before. In the podcast, two…
My colleague Glen Weyl and Eric Posner at the University of Chicago Law School, argue in a recent white paper, that new financial products should be subject to regulatory approval…
An article in The Economist argues that a little auction theory might solve some of the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) current LIBOR problems: Some of LIBOR’s failures also have echoes…
A new paper in the American Economic Review (abstract; PDF), summarized here, finds that Americans aren’t very consistent when thinking about financial risk. Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Iuliana Pascu, and…
In recent years, the effects of microcredit, particularly the high-interest loans offered by for-profit lenders, have been hotly debated. New research (abstract; PDF) from Dean Karlan and two co-authors, which…
He’s an economist who studies even weirder things than Steve. They discuss whether economics is the best of the social sciences, and why it’s a good idea to get a…
She’s the author of the bestselling book Grit, and a University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology — a field Steve says he knows nothing about. But once Angela gives Steve…
